The school has outgrown the existing internet connection and needs something more capable

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Original system: 10Mb synchronous WAN link to the local schools' broadband consortium.

This basic link served the school well for a number of years, but with more and more demands being placed on the connection from the ever-growing influx of devices, we needed to find something more suitable.

At the time we started looking, our town was conveniently waiting for fibre to be activated. A lot of quotes from a lot of companies came in based on fibre, which was going to be the simplest and most cost effective route.

Just to throw a spanner in the works, all our telephone lines run directly into the main exchange. No supplier in our area will patch fibre within the exchange itself. We enquired about running new lines to a nearby fibre-enabled cabinet, but the cost was prohibitive, so we needed to find an alternative.

Leased lines were priced beyond what our school was willing to pay, which leaves only one remaining option - ADSL. One connection on it's own won't sustain our system, so after discussions with various suppliers, we've settled on a load-balanced solution. We currently have two lines running into an 8-port Cisco Catalyst 3560, which balances the connections between the lines. If we need extra capacity, we can add an additional two lines in the future.

The Cisco equipment is maintained by our ISP, however they have been terribly nice and supplied us with some console cables and the credentials required to access the devices should we need to maintain them ourselves.

The next problem to overcome is security and web filtering - as a school the requirements on us to protect our students are quite strict. Previously our connection was protected and filtered by the broadband consortium before it reached our edge device, so we are starting afresh.

After a lot of trials, pestering of reps and getting prices, we settled on a Barracuda Firewall appliance with a subscription to the Barracuda Web Security Flex system. I'll admit I had a few issues with the initial setup as networking in this fashion is not my forte, but the chaps at Barracuda support have been fantastic.

The whole system is now catering for our requirements with ease, the users are a lot happier and it's very nice to have full control of our own security & filtering.

We made the switch with barely an issue - just a few devices failing to pick up the changed proxy settings via GPO, but other than that, very straightforward.